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'The Question of Questions' CHAPTER 4 ‘The Question of Questions’ T.H. Huxley, Evolution by Natural Selection and Buddhism Let me begin with a brief word about the day on which I have chosen to give this talk: October the 23rd. It is a day of singular significance for skeptics like myself. It was in 1654 (when Rembrandt and Milton were alive) that Archbishop Ussher, the Primate of all Ireland, calculated that the Earth was created on 23 October 4004 BC at 9 o’clock in the morning — Greenwich Mean Time. It is now known that the Earth is about 4,112 billion years old, and that we humans, like all other living things, are the products of evolution by natural selection. Nonetheless, as I hope you will agree, October the 23rd is a poetically correct day on which to discuss T.H. Huxley’s heretical ‘question of questions’. ‘The question of questions’ for we humans, ‘the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other’ is, T.H. Huxley declared in 1863, ‘the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature’ and of his relation to the universe of things. ‘Whence have we come’ and ‘to what goal are we tending’: these are the questions, declared Huxley, ‘which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest’ to every human being born into the world. These are indeed the great and enduring anthropological questions. They were echoed in 1897 by Paul Gauguin in his moving painting of Polynesians (now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) on which he wrote (in French): ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ And, they were reiterated in Gustav Mahler’s haunting words at the outset of this present century, ‘Whence do we come? Whither does our road take us?’ 67 DILTHEY'S DREAM T.H. Huxley’s posing of what he called the ‘question of questions’ came at a crucial turning point in human intellectual history, just four years after the publication, in 1859, of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. The answer that Huxley gave in 1863 in his book Man’s Place in Nature, and 30 years later in his Romanes Lecture on ‘Evolution and Ethics’, are still of invigorating human interest. Indeed, with the emergence in the mid-1990s of what has been called a ‘new evolutionary enlightenment’, Huxley’s views have assumed renewed significance, and bear, with lively pertinence, on the future development of anthropology and our appreciation of what it means to be human. It is about this ‘new evolutionary enlightenment’ and Huxley’s concern, as an evolutionary thinker, with the human significance of choice behaviour, and of value systems like Buddhism, that I shall be speaking — values being the product of the human capacity to make choices. Thomas Henry Huxley was born in England in 1825. After serving in HMS Rattlesnake for four years in Australian and New Guinea waters, as a surgeon and naturalist, and his election to the Royal Society of London, when only 26 years of age, he had by 1859 established himself as one of England’s brightest young biologists. His first reflection after mastering (in that year) the central idea of Darwin’s Origin of Species was: ‘How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that!’ In November 1859, he wrote to Darwin: ‘I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse or misrepresentation which, unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you. Depend on it, you have earned the lasting gratitude of all thoughtful men. And, as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead. I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.’ Huxley used them to telling effect during the summer of the following year when, during the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, he found himself on the same platform as Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. 68 ‘THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONs’ The opposition to Darwin had indeed been fierce, and Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, having assured his audience at great length that there was absolutely nothing in the idea of evolution, turned to the 35-year-old Huxley and, with smiling insolence, begged to know whether it was through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose, a slight figure, stern and pale, very quiet and grave, to tell the high and mighty Bishop of Oxford: I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin, but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostitutes the gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood. The effect of these uncompromising words in Victorian England in 1860 was quite tremendous: one lady fainted and had to be carried out; others in the audience jumped clear out of their seats. Evolution by natural selection had indeed become a force to be reckoned with. In the Origin of Species, Darwin had not, in fact, discussed the bearing of evolutionary theory on the human species, other than to remark that ‘Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’. Of all the burning questions raised by the Origin of Species this was by far the most unnerving. And, having told Darwin: ‘I will stop at no point as long as clear reasoning will carry me further,’ it was the intellectually intrepid Huxley, who had been conducting his own research on the comparative anatomy of primates, who in London, in 1860, gave a series of six lectures on ‘The Relation of Man to the Lower Animals’. This was heady stuff, and when, in 1862, Huxley gave two lectures on this same theme to the Philosophical Institute of Edinburgh, he was accused, in a local newspaper, of blasphemy and of having committed a ‘foul outrage’ on the entire human species. Huxley was not deterred. Rather, he was inclined to think it ‘a good thing’, as he subsequently remarked to Haeckel, ‘for a man, once at any rate in his life, to perform a public war-dance against all sorts of humbug and imposture’. 69 DILTHEY'S DREAM In 1863, then, he published his epoch-making book Man’s Place in Nature in which, in concise and lucid prose, he showed, as he put it, ‘that no absolute structural line of demarcation … can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves’. Huxley was thus the first to construct, on the basis of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, a clear and logical image of biological man, and, as such, is clearly the founder of evolutionary anthropology. For this achievement, Huxley was subjected, for some years, to no end of obloquy, but, as he wrote to Lord Rosebury: ‘Abuse for six or seven years on the part of the public is not of the greatest consequence when one happens to be in the right and stands to one’s guns.’ Scientific research during the 133 years since the first publication of Man’s Place in Nature has demonstrated that Huxley was indeed in the right. There is now conclusive evidence of the fact of evolution by natural selection, and of the fact that we humans are part of the natural order. Simon Easteal, who heads the Human Genetics Group in the John Curtin School of Medical Research of The Australian National University, having estimated that there is only 1.6 per cent difference between human nuclear DNA and that of chimpanzees, has, with his colleagues, concluded that humans diverged from chimpanzees only some 3.6 to 4 million years ago. We have thus reached a juncture in the history of human understanding when, as Daniel Dennett has recently put it, ‘the fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution is … beyond dispute among scientists’. We are, as has become utterly clear, the products of evolution. Or, to put it more dramatically, we are not fallen angels, but risen apes. This key realisation changes all of our long-established assumptions about ourselves. In its light, human history, for the first time, becomes intelligible, and human behaviour understandable as never before. This radical transformation in human understanding — which has come to a peak in the mid-1990s — I shall call the ‘new evolutionary enlightenment’. And, I confidently predict that, because it is based on fully tested scientific knowledge, it will far outshine the enlightenment of the 18th century. 70 ‘THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONs’ But, the facing of our evolutionary origins has certain ineluctable consequences. As Stephen Jay Gould has put it, ‘We may yearn for a “higher” answer — but none exists. And this explanation though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating.’ ‘We cannot,’ as Gould says, ‘read the meaning of life passively into the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves — from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.’ And, it is precisely here that Huxley’s Romanes Lecture on ‘Evolution and Ethics’ becomes so important. In March 1880, in a lecture at the Royal Institution, Huxley was able to claim that there was ‘no field of biological inquiry in which the influence of Darwin’s Origin of Species was not traceable’. This was indeed the case. From about 1871, with the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Manand Tylor’s Primitive Culture, evolution had been a dominant force in both biology and anthropology.
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